Fresh, seasonal fruit and vegetables
Get together with your family, friends and neighbours to create your own Fruit & Veg Co-op! Here's how we run ours.
Ours started as simply as my sister and I going out to Sydney Markets at Flemington and found it was cheaper to buy by the box and split it.
The idea being that we can eat much better quality and variety, we’d be buying from the growers and providores, save on the drive by sharing the shopping over the year, and of course, save money.
But the volumes were too much for just the two households. So we invited a few more households to be involved, and established a few "rules" around how it would work and gave it a name "FruitLoop".
Each fortnight we send a pair of "shoppers" out with $30 per household and about 10 households per shop. Can you imagine spending about $300 on boxes and boxes of fresh fruit, veg and eggs at the markets? It pushes some of our members smaller cars to the limit.
We set up an email group, making communication really easy. The week of the shop a reminder goes out on the Monday for everyone to get their $30 "electronically transferred" to one of our members accounts. Thursday is cut-off day - if you don't have the money in by Thursday, you’re not included in that weeks shop. On Thursday the money then gets transferred to one of the "shoppers" ready for Saturday morning. The "shopper" then emails everyone the time-frame for distribution & pick-up.
On the day of the shop, the shoppers head out early or late depending on their sleep preferences, with a loose shopping list of good staples and seasonal favourites. For $30 we always get great variety and volume.
It’s often quite a social event with a bbq brunch cook-up at the collection house while we divide all the produce. Those "use immediately" tomatoes and mushrooms go straight on the hotplate with any eggs that don't divide nicely into boxes - lovely.
Another thing we do as a group, is hold a Christmas in July progressive dinner, we all live relatively close together so a few of us offer to host a course and we work out the best walking route for the evening. We usually eat so much that we need to walk between the courses to work up our appetite for the next course. The shop prior to our dinner usually has some special orders for our hosts to cook up some lovely wintery christmassy treats.
The FruitLoop are a fun bunch and I hope that I have inspired you to think about pulling your own group together and create your own co-op ... perhaps you will be "Fruitlicious" or "Vegi-nanas" or "eggs n' vegs"
Good luck
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